In this issue Jim Dalrymple looks at how Apple is able to capture the essence of our lives and touch us with its TV ads; Darren Murph argues that it’s time for the phone number to die; Alex Vollmer tells us all about tube amps, including a wonderful video; Kirk McElhearn looks at collecting music and how it has changed; and Nathan Snelgrove explains how a $600 guitar means so much.
Apple on Thursday released a major update to its professional audio recording and editing software, Logic Pro X. There are feature enhancements and more than 450 bug fixes in this release.
The user will be notified to download the new and updated content the first time Logic Pro X is launched after the update. A full list of all the enhancements and fixes is available on Apple’s Web site. The highlights are listed below.
Logic Pro X 10.0.5
MainStage 3.0.2
Logic Remote 1.0.3
I truly do not get how Cy Kuckenbaker did this, but I’m sure it took a decent amount of smarts and elbow grease. In a nutshell, he took some raw traffic footage of vehicles going under an overpass and sorted all the vehicles by color, then time compressed the whole thing. It’s mesmerizing. I love the motorcycles tootling by at the very end.
The Atlantic ran this excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s book, Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution. This looks really good.
By January 2007, they’d all worked sixty-to-eighty-hour weeks for fifteen months—some for more than two years—writing and testing code, negotiating software licenses, and flying all over the world to find the right parts, suppliers, and manufacturers. They had been working with prototypes for six months and had planned a launch by the end of the year . . . until Jobs took the stage to unveil the iPhone.
Chris DeSalvo’s reaction to the iPhone was immediate and visceral. “As a consumer I was blown away. I wanted one immediately. But as a Google engineer, I thought ‘We’re going to have to start over.’”
And this on Andy Rubin’s reaction:
On the day Jobs announced the iPhone, the director of the Android team, Andy Rubin, was six hundred miles away in Las Vegas, on his way to a meeting with one of the myriad handset makers and carriers that descend on the city for the Consumer Electronics Show. He reacted exactly as DeSalvo predicted. Rubin was so astonished by what Jobs was unveiling that, on his way to a meeting, he had his driver pull over so that he could finish watching the webcast.
“Holy crap,” he said to one of his colleagues in the car. “I guess we’re not going to ship that phone.”
I’ll say!
I think I’m more excited about the Mac Pro than I was about the iPad Air. Both the base and high end models show US shipping dates of December 30th.
On the low end of the scale, the bare-bones base model (3.7GHz quad-core with 10MB of L3 cache, 12GB (3x4GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 256 GB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) is $2,999.
At the tippy top, a fully loaded high-end model (with 2.7GHz 12-core/30MB of L3 cache, 64GB (4x16GB) of 1866MHz DDR3 ECC, 1 TB flash, Dual AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of GDDR5 VRAM each) will set you back $9,599.
There’s also an option to add a Sharp 32″ 4K LED Monitor for $3,595.
If you’ve shopped at Target between Nov. 27 and Dec. 15, chances are good this applies to you. Yeesh.
Investigators believe the data was obtained via software installed on machines that customers use to swipe magnetic strips on their cards when paying for merchandise at Target stores…
I wonder how they got access to the credit card swipers. All somehow programmable remotely? Astonishing.
Pretty impressive group of nominees:
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame has officially announced next year’s inductees: Nirvana, Kiss, Peter Gabriel, Hall and Oates, Cat Stevens and Linda Ronstadt will all join the class of 2014. The E Street Band will be given the Award for Musical Excellence and Beatles manager Brian Epstein and original Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham will both receive the Ahmet Ertegun Award for non-performers.
On Nirvana getting nominated this year:
Artists are eligible for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 25 years after the release of their first album or single. Nirvana, whose first single “Love Buzz” came out in 1988, are entering the institution their first year of eligibility. “That’s really no surprise to me,” says Rock and Roll Hall of Fame President and CEO Joel Peresman. “People see the relevancy of that band. We’re just getting into the creative of the show, so I don’t know what’s going to happen with that performance. They have to figure it out.”
Jim and Dan talk about the new Mac Pro’s, the Universal Audio Apollo, Nokia’s latest commercial, how to get better at guitar without practicing, and more.
Sponsored by Shutterstock (use code DANSENTME1213 for 25% off), Hover (use code DANSENTME for 10% off), and Squarespace (use code DANSENTME12 for 10% off).
If you’re going to get a lens for your iPhone 5c, it might as well be a cool color. I’ve been meaning to try these lenses out.
ToneCloud is a sharing platform that allows BIAS users to interact with each other and share their custom amps right inside BIAS. Users can now explore popular and latest custom amp models, and can further search by music genres or keywords. Also, sharing is more intuitive than ever: an upload button is always visible in BIAS no matter in what stage of the amp creation process, this makes sharing much easier and faster.
This company is incredible. Good work.
Photos+ can replace the built-in Photos app for viewing, organizing, and sharing your pictures. It looks prettier, it has more sharing options, and it shows you more info about where, when, and how each photo was taken.
Nice looking app.
Hayao Miyazaki is a genius, no doubt. Spirited Away is one of my all-time favorite films, though Ponyo and Princess Mononoke run a close second.
The Wind Rises looks to be Miyazaki’s final film. Very sad. The English-language cast includes Emily Blunt, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Stanley Tucci, John Krasinski and Mandy Patinkin. Fantastic.
Should hit US theaters about 21 Feb, 2014. Can’t wait.
Data stickies is a design concept, but not necessarily a pipe dream. There’s some real science here.
dataSTICKIES are conceptualized to be made in graphene, a ground-breaking new material which is a flat mono-layer of carbon atoms tightly packed into a two dimensional honeycomb lattice with a minimum thickness of one atom. A paper thin sheet of graphene has the capacity to carry huge volumes of data.
The idea would be to have a stack of data stickies behave like a daisy chained set of hard drives. When you stick the sticky on your monitor (or a sticky-ready surface connected to your computer), all the stickies would appear as mounted volumes on your computer.
Love the design, obviously there are many practical hurdles to overcome. But this type of conceptualization is exactly what R&D should be all about. Let the haters hate. I say bravo and keep dreaming and scheming.
Clearly they post production did a great job replacing the igloo with a real house.
Kids, this is why you don’t do drugs while making a TV ad.
Lyve Minds’ answer to the problem is to recreate the cloud in your living room. The company’s apps will let phones, tablets and computers talk to each other and access personal media on each of them. Lyve supports iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS at launch, with plans to add more platforms down the road. The company’s apps will back up photos from a mobile device to other devices in the network, free up and reallocate space and always keep multiple copies of each file.
It will be interesting to see how Tim Bucher pulls this off.
I absolutely cannot wait. A powerhouse and a thing of beauty.
The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2,999 (US); and with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $3,999 (US). Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage. Additional technical specifications, configure-to-order options and accessories are available online at www.apple.com/mac-pro.
Yes please.
In a rare blog post, John W. Thompson, a member of Microsoft’s board of directors and chair of the board’s search committee, updated the world on the progress of Microsoft’s CEO search.
As the chair of the Board’s search committee, I’m pleased with our progress. The Board has taken the thoughtful approach that our shareholders, customers, partners and employees expect and deserve. After defining our criteria, we initially cast a wide net across a number of different industries and skill sets. We identified over 100 possible candidates, talked with several dozen, and then focused our energy intensely on a group of about 20 individuals, all extremely impressive in their own right. As you would expect, as this group has narrowed, we’ve done deeper research and investigation, including with the full Board. We’re moving ahead well, and I expect we’ll complete our work in the early part of 2014.
Best of luck. A critical choice. Take the time to get it right.
Think about the physics involved in this bike trick. First, he flips the bike over. That pulls him into motion completing his first flip. And this gives him the momentum to complete the second flip. It’s all quite beautiful. Give it a watch.
A lot has been written about the National Radio Quiet Zone.
The United States National Radio Quiet Zone is a large area of land centered between the National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia and the Sugar Grove Research Facility at Sugar Grove, West Virginia. The Radio Quiet Zone is a rectangle of land approximately 13,000 square miles (34,000 km2) in size that straddles the border area of Virginia and West Virginia. It includes all land with latitudes between 37° 30′ 0.4″ N and 39° 15′ 0.4″ N and longitudes between 78° 29′ 59.0″ W and 80° 29′ 59.2″ W.
Inside the quiet zone, you can’t use a cell phone, can’t use microwave oven. No wireless internet. Nothing that generates radio waves that might interfere with the giant radio telescopes at Green Bank and Sugar Grove.
I found this video charming, especially the part that describes visitors trying to deal with the fact that they can’t use their iPads and iPhones.
Great tip from Gabe Weatherhead. I didn’t know you could do this.
I like Native Instruments’ products, so there is no reason not to give it a try. I downloaded it.
STOP IT! Pay the money and go away you thieving bastards.
The iPhone 5s came in in third place overall, behind Nelson Mandela and Paul Walker. Among smartphones, though, Apple’s iPhone 5s took the top spot, beating out the Galaxy S4 for the most searched-for handset. The iPhone 5c took third place, followed by the HTC One and Google’s Nexus 5.
Impressive.
I hate when companies do stuff like this.
Dustin Curtis:
The best way to predict the future is to think about desire. The problem with desire is that it tends to be bounded by what’s actually possible; as we grow older, our imaginations seem to develop artificial caps that limit our ideas to things that are reasonably achievable in the short term. But who cares about what is reasonable? Here’s what I want.
Yes, far fetched, but if you’re going to dream, dream big.
Samsung is said to be planning its own Apple-like retail push across the U.S., as the company recently hired an ex-Apple senior store designer, according to a new report.
Why the fuck not, they copied everything else Apple did.
Steven Aquino:
From a pure design perspective, aesthetically speaking, it’s perfectly reasonable to criticize the new shapes. They are indeed ugly, but the overall importance of this new addition trumps the way in which they’re presented. That is to say, regardless of how the buttons look, the sheer fact that they add a level of desprately-needed contrast makes the buttons a huge usability win, and likely — rightfully — will garner much praise from the visually impaired segment of the accessibility community.
Designers need to remember this when criticizing the new button shapes.
This looks like a nice stand. It’s inexpensive too.